Team GB has done well in Prospect magazine's new list of "the world's leading thinkers", with the inclusion of Paul Collier, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Jeremy Grantham, Peter Higgs, Hilary Mantel, Oliver Sacks, Zadie Smith and Nicholas Stern giving the UK a total of nine – second only to the US's 26, and more than Africa (3), Latin America (3), Japan (1) and Russia (1) put together.

China, India, France and Israel are the only other nations to score more than one, in an exercise gratingly designed to end in X Factor mode – via voting on the monthly's website – with one super-sage "crowned the world's most important thinker of 2013".

Cynics from the rest of Europe and the developing world will doubtless attribute British thinkers' success to the fact that five of Prospect's 10 selectors are UK-based – Nature editor Philip Campbell, Stephanie Flanders, Prospect editor Bronwen Maddox, David Miliband and historian Maria Misra – with the other five from America, apart from French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy (who must be seething at not making the cut himself, whereas his fellow-judge Anne Applebaum is included).

The 65-strong list (though two entries are co-authoring double acts, so the true total is 67) includes 15 women, ranging from IMF boss Christine Lagarde and Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg to authors such as Katherine Boo, Martha Nussbaum and Arundhati Roy. Excluding social sciences, there are just nine entries representing the whole of science – but a spectacular 19 economists, easily the best-represented academic field and perhaps testimony to Flanders's persuasive skills in the elimination process.

Prospect has produced lists of public intellectuals before, in 2005 and 2008, and comparison mercilessly exposes who has fallen out of the reckoning, like golf or tennis stars dropping down the rankings: among those who figured in earlier top 100s, but no longer even make the top 67, are Chinua Achebe, Noam Chomsky, JM Coetzee, Umberto Eco, Germaine Greer, Jürgen Habermas, Naomi Klein, James Lovelock, Salman Rushdie and Edward O Wilson.

That's partly down to an explicit insistence that these mightiest of minds must be "still active in public life" and score high points for "currency" ("influence over the past 12 months" and relevance to "this year's biggest questions"). This means that lengthy, distinguished CVs are irrelevant if your output and impact are now weaker, and conversely that you can get in on the basis of a single recent work, like Boo or the Iranian film-maker Asghar (A Separation) Farhadi.

It can't be entirely coincidental, however, that the new list is so deficient in eco-pundits, digital gurus, feminist theorists, radical left campaigners and academic boundary-crossers, categories all represented in earlier ones: it's as if a debating theatre has largely been cleared of these unruly figures, allowing wonks to talk sensibly about policy with each other and a few congenial historians and philosophers.

Nor can these mavericks be reinstated by voting: there are no write-in candidates in Prospect's rather limited version of democracy, which only allows you to pick a top three from the elite 67 named by the 10 wise people. So you can vote for Richard Dawkins, Zadie Smith or Ai Weiwei as your Thought Idol; but not for, say, Tim Berners-Lee, Jonathan Franzen or Aung San Suu Kyi.